Here in Germany we are still doing fine with hand counting, even though at times we have over 50 different parties on the paper ballot sheets. Works out OK with a population of ca. 80 million, a high share of vote-by-mail, etc. Mail-in votes are not even opened at all before polling stations close. Yet we usually have official final results within the night of election, and almost always by end of next day.
PS: there are of course computers and digital communication involved in the later stages of the process when individual polling stations report their count results upstream, but as a voter you only deal with pen and paper, and staff at the actual polling stations only has pen and paper, too, with the first step of reporting results being by phone, then having sealed boxes and result envelopes being transferred for double checking and storage. And as everyone (up to room capacity) is allowed to watch the actual counting you can always check whether the numbers you have been seeing at the local polling station matches what is reported for that district in the official results later.
PPS: we have the "advantage" of mandatory "place of residence registration", that spares us from having to specifically register to vote. Anyone of legal voting age will just get their voting notification in the mail a few weeks prior to election, listing where their polling station is, and what to do to apply for vote-by-mail instead. At the polling station you show your notification, they check it against the printed list of voters for that voting district, and *may* also ask for your national ID card. If you lost your notification letter you can still vote, but then showing your ID is mandatory. Oh, and we vote on Sundays, and typically your polling station is within a kilometer or less from where you live, so you just walk over at a convenient time. Usually you can get the actual voting done within 5 minutes or less, as there are hardly any significant queues. I only remember standing in a significant queue while pandemic restrictions were still in place and slowing down the process, but not on any other election before or after.
@@hartmutholzgraefe thank you so much for your perspective! It definitely sounds less Byzantine than our system and I agree that paper ballots are the way to go, although I wasn't able to fully convince my AI hosts!
Here in Germany we are still doing fine with hand counting, even though at times we have over 50 different parties on the paper ballot sheets.
Works out OK with a population of ca. 80 million, a high share of vote-by-mail, etc. Mail-in votes are not even opened at all before polling stations close.
Yet we usually have official final results within the night of election, and almost always by end of next day.
PS: there are of course computers and digital communication involved in the later stages of the process when individual polling stations report their count results upstream, but as a voter you only deal with pen and paper, and staff at the actual polling stations only has pen and paper, too, with the first step of reporting results being by phone, then having sealed boxes and result envelopes being transferred for double checking and storage.
And as everyone (up to room capacity) is allowed to watch the actual counting you can always check whether the numbers you have been seeing at the local polling station matches what is reported for that district in the official results later.
PPS: we have the "advantage" of mandatory "place of residence registration", that spares us from having to specifically register to vote.
Anyone of legal voting age will just get their voting notification in the mail a few weeks prior to election, listing where their polling station is, and what to do to apply for vote-by-mail instead.
At the polling station you show your notification, they check it against the printed list of voters for that voting district, and *may* also ask for your national ID card. If you lost your notification letter you can still vote, but then showing your ID is mandatory.
Oh, and we vote on Sundays, and typically your polling station is within a kilometer or less from where you live, so you just walk over at a convenient time. Usually you can get the actual voting done within 5 minutes or less, as there are hardly any significant queues. I only remember standing in a significant queue while pandemic restrictions were still in place and slowing down the process, but not on any other election before or after.
@@hartmutholzgraefe thank you so much for your perspective! It definitely sounds less Byzantine than our system and I agree that paper ballots are the way to go, although I wasn't able to fully convince my AI hosts!
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